Shawn’s Painting of the Week, July 20, 2009

“Benedict Farm” (Montgomery, NY) this park is the outdoor classroom of the Wallkill River School. We can often be found dotting the landscape with our easels and painting almost any day of the week. Come paint with us at www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce
Many of us watch the stock market with dismay as our investments take a nose dive. Most Americans rather would invest in Main Street than Wall Street, but the current economic system tends toward globalization instead of localization. Local economist and author Michael Shuman points out that “outdated federal securities laws have left Main Street dangerously dependant on Wall Street, and overhauling these regulations turns out to be a hidden key to economic revitalization.”

Shuman, author of “The Small-Mart Revolution,” cites a recent study showing that small local businesses, which usually start out as sole proprietorships, are three times more profitable for investors than C-corporations, which are large, global corporations. Rising fuel costs and a fall in the value of the dollar are part of the reason for this new trend. For example, small family-owned vineyards in New York can retail wine at or below the costs that large corporate vineyards in California do because of the costs of carting bottles of wine across the country. This is starting to “even the playing field” for small producers.

There is also a growing consciousness among consumers that small businesses really are the backbones of our communities. These businesses spend more of their incomes locally, which creates a multiplier effect, further boosting local economies. They also add “local color” to villages, which attracts tourism, and they encourage walkable communities, entrepreneurship, community building and the revitalization of our downtowns. “Every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times more economic benefit — measured in income, wealth, jobs, and tax revenue — than a dollar spent at a globally owned business,” Shuman says.

Green jobs tend to be locally based, creating a whole new genre of local business. Already, half our economy comes from small local businesses. Factor in nonprofits, such as the one I run, and that figure jumps up closer to 60 percent of all economic activity. As we begin to transition toward services instead of goods, more money will stay in our communities.
For example, when we buy weatherization services instead of fuel oil, more of our money goes to the local contractors who do weatherization instead of to the multinational corporations that refine oil.

Local businesses are our future and the only viable economic solution to our current economic crisis, yet very little of our investment dollars are staying locally, at businesses we frequent every day. Instead, all our pensions and 401(k) funds go to Fortune 500 companies. Shuman suggests that simple reforms to antiquated trading laws would allow local businesses to participate in the stock exchange. He says, “One easy reform would be for the (Securities and Exchange Commission) to allow low-risk public ownership of locally owned microbusinesses.”

Shuman is suggesting that small companies be able to sell shares to people in their home states, with no one owning more than $100 worth of a single stock. This would lower the risk and spread the opportunity and investment to more small businesses. If we were to enact this reform, trillions of dollars would begin to flow into small mom and pop businesses across the nation. This move would encourage new businesses to reflect the needs of the community shareholders and encourage investors to keep their money within their respective regions.

Unlike the current economic stimulus plan, Shuman’s suggestion would cost nothing to implement and would create immeasurable local jobs as investment money flowed toward local entrepreneurs, who would generate millions of new businesses and jobs. The result would be a stronger nation, with a vast network of interdependent local economies. This would be a far more sustainable and stable economic system than our current one, which is dependent upon using up dwindling resources, generating mountains of waste, and intensifying poverty and poor working conditions around the world. Shawn can be reached at shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Many of us have watched our utility bills triple in the past few years. This can be a real problem, especially for seniors and those living on fixed incomes. But there are ways you can level off your utility bills and green your home at the same time.

“About 30-35 percent of your home’s utility bill goes to maintaining a standing tank of hot water that you use only a few times a day,” notes Patrick Gallagher of Gallagher Solar Thermal. “Solar hot water eliminates up to 70 percent of that part of your energy bill.”

Recent incentives and tax credits eliminate about half the upfront costs of a solar hot water system, putting it squarely within any homeowner’s reach. Unlike solar electric panels, you do not have to have an energy audit or upgrade your appliances to take advantage of solar hot water. It is the simplest and least expensive green energy upgrade you can make.

Warwick, N.Y., residents Jerry and Lucy Fischetti had Gallagher install a typical two-panel solar hot water system on their beautiful Victorian home. The system cost about $9,000, but more than half the cost was defrayed by tax credits and incentives. The installed price was closer to $4,000. If this cost were paid by a low-interest loan over a 10-year period, the savings on the Fischettis’ monthly utility bill would be greater than the cost to pay back the loan.

A solar hot water system could have you pocketing part of the money you would have paid your utility company. “We are already paying for the cost of a solar hot water system through the recent increase in our utility bills,” notes Gallagher. “Why not do the planet and your bank account a favor and have the installation?”

Summer heat is upon us, and the last thing you want to do is waste your money adding more heat to your home through inefficient lighting. If you have traditional incandescent light bulbs, 90 percent of the energy you are paying for is heat, warming your house rather than lighting it. Compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs, are the brightest idea since Thomas Edison’s electric candle.
These are the squiggly tubular bulbs, which last up to 10 times longer than their egg-shaped counterparts. If you replace every light bulb in your house that you turn on for an average of five hours a day or more with a CFL, you will save about $45 per bulb on your yearly electric bill, equaling about $50 per month for the average household.

If all the households in America replaced even just one highly used incandescent light bulb with a CFL, we would save 20 percent of our energy consumption and be able to close down many coal-burning plants. “Lighting a whole room so you can see what you’re doing is similar to refrigerating a whole house to preserve perishable food,” notes energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Our food system is a highly subsidized network of environmental disasters. The average bite of food we eat has traveled 1,500 miles from the farm to our fork, according to “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” author Barbara Kingsolver. Those “food miles” add up to about 18 percent of our carbon emissions as a nation and about 20 percent of our families’ budgets. Eating locally, especially if you convert your perfectly manicured lawn into an edible garden, can save you money on your food bills, doctors’ bills, and the costs of maintaining the perfect lawn.

If you are an apartment dweller, eating locally means buying in season from the farmers market and preserving part of the harvest for the winter. Local food purchased in season is always less expensive and is of higher quality than its mass-produced counterparts trucked from commercial farms across the country.

Doing these three green things right now will help your family weather the recession and better the environment at the same time.

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com

Shawn’s Painting of the Week  – 07/12/09

PIne Island Onion Fields

By Shawn Dell Joyce

It is an unwritten law of the universe that when the going gets tough, the tough build community. We all have experienced acts of kindness and generosity that have brought us to tears. These sometimes-small acts give us hope that helps us face even the darkest days. All of us have friends and family members who have lost their jobs or livelihoods during the current economic downturn. Building community is one way of making sure that these loved ones do not lose their dignity and slip through the tears in our social fabric.

Host a local-foods potluck dinner, and suggest these budget-stretching ideas to your friends and family:

• Create “work parties.” Partygoers would meet each week for an afternoon of work at a different participant’s house. Work crews could tackle costly chores — such as splitting firewood, painting the house, caulking and weatherproofing the house — that the hosting participant otherwise would have to pay for. Attendance is mandatory to ensure that all involved give and receive their fair share. Tasks are completed more quickly, are more fun, and are far less costly than they would be if you hired the work out.

• Pool your resources. By sharing things such as tools, lawn mowers, pools, carpet cleaners and other costly items, it eliminates the need for each household in your community to purchase these things. Rules can be attached to the use of each item. For example, “You must clean the pool after each use.” “Chain saw must be returned sharpened, oiled and gassed.” A community tool chest can be set up online, with a calendar attached for accountability.

• If you have small children, host a play date party, and ask the mothers to bring bags of too-small clothes to swap. Why spend the family money on children’s clothes, which will be outgrown before their useful lives are over? The same works for adult clothes. Leftover clothes can be donated to immigrant worker services, foster homes or any of the charities that now accept used clothes.

• As the summer harvest starts to roll in, host a canning party. Purchase bushels of fresh tomatoes, and spend the day in the kitchen with your closest friends making sauce, canning and enjoying one another’s friendship. The same can be done with cornhusking and making pickles, salsa and jams. Each friend brings a box of clean jars and goes home with a share of the goodies. This helps to feed your family well over the winter and positively impacts local farmers economically, guaranteeing food security.

If you already have a well-established network of like-minded people, you can make a big difference in your community by:

• Creating a local investment club in which each pool has a certain amount of money. This money can be lent to local entrepreneurs wishing to start new businesses, farmers wishing to convert to organic or cooperatives, or even to save beloved local restaurants on the edge of bankruptcy. Most banks won’t make microloans to community members when they need them. Because friends and family would be involved in your club, it may be possible to arrange for farmers to repay the loans with shares of their harvests or for restaurants to repay investors with dinner out once a month. Imagine how that would help your local community. In my community, I am investigating the possibility of a community-owned hydroelectric power plant.

• Establishing a green-energy task force that combines a local certified energy auditor with a local banker and local certified contractors who do weatherization and insulation. This “green team” can help homeowners and small businesses reduce their electric and heating bills substantially and take advantage of recent incentives through state and national sources. The rising costs of energy guarantee that people who take advantage of energy efficiency will save more money on their electric bills than they spend on the efficiency improvements. By setting up a green team, you are simplifying the process and generating local economic impact. This may save jobs and livelihoods in your community, as well as keep more money in local pockets.

• Starting a “think local first” campaign in your area to create more local jobs, strengthen local businesses, and generate stronger local economies. For more information, see the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies Web site, at http://www.LivingEconomies.org.

shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Within every crisis is the opportunity for growth, and the current economic crisis offers a chance to build our local economies after decades of building credit-bubble economics. Many of us are realizing the fallacy of globalism, as our country has slipped from an exporter to an importer and most of our manufacturing jobs have fled our shores. We are so deeply in debt it will be a miracle if we ever get out!

Our culture has come to value wealth in dollars and overlook what real wealth means: community, that sense of belonging to a certain place and calling it home. Most of us rather would live comfortably and know that our friends and neighbors have the same comfort level than feel that we are separated by wealth from our peers. Most people we think of as rich do not want their wealth to cause poverty for others.

Having real wealth and a functional economy means that we live happy and productive lives, in harmony with the Earth, and build strong, stable families and communities while keeping the ecosystems that sustain us intact. Real wealth is passing on a healthy planet to the next generation so that they will have what they need to survive.

Economists are beginning to see the wisdom in refocusing the economy from the global to the local and, by extension, revitalizing American communities. David Korten, who wrote “Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth,” says: “As challenging as the economic meltdown may be, it buys time to build a new economy that serves life rather than money. It lays bare the fact that the existing financial system has brought our way of life and the natural systems on which we depend to the brink of collapse.”

So how do we build an economy based on living within the natural limits of our planet?

Use only today’s sunlight! Much of our current environmental crisis comes from our using stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. If we wean ourselves from the artificial productivity of oil and rely instead on capturing and using just today’s sunlight, wind, tidal and other forms of energy, then we are living within our means and respecting our planet’s natural limits and resources.

Foster cottage industry! So much of our current economy depends on our making money from money.
We need to foster local industry and develop industry around local needs. For example, Berkeley, Calif., restaurateur Alice Waters pays local farms to fill her restaurant’s needs rather than ordering meats and produce from outside the community.

Invest in the community! If a local farm or business is going under, perhaps we can save it by making modest investments. For example, in Morrisville, Vt., a community restaurant paid its investors with $90 worth of meals each quarter.

Most of us lost a great deal of the values of our retirement accounts. If those accounts were invested in local sole proprietorships instead of large-scale C-corporation global businesses, we would be reaping a rate of return three times higher. Local businesses also offer a benefit that global corporations cannot: They improve the quality of your community. You always can check on your investment when you pass it on your way home every day.

Barter! Money is a new concept compared with bartering. There are always things with which we can barter, such as homemade preserves, fresh eggs, baby-sitting and handyman services, and always things we need that we don’t quite have the money for. People who have lost their jobs may feel awkward about asking for help. Bartering allows folks to keep their dignity by allowing them to give things in return, and it also creates local economic impact. It is an ancient and time-honored tradition that helps many people make ends meet.

Be a good neighbor! When we have to face the trials and tribulations of life alone, they are magnified. When we have the love and help of neighbors, our problems are diminished. Neighborly acts create economic value. If your garden is overflowing, leave a bag of zucchini on your neighbor’s porch. If you have an extra pan of lasagna, bring dinner to an elderly neighbor. We all appreciate homemade and homegrown things, and it may make a world of difference to someone who has just lost his job.

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

By Shawn Dell Joyce

The recent swine flu outbreak highlighted how our food system is making us sick. Our best antibiotics are losing their effectiveness, and we are percolating super microbes on our factory farms. Antibiotics have saved countless lives, but recently antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise. Microbes have been on the planet a lot longer than we have, can evolve a lot quicker, and have begun to overcome our best defenses. Currently, more than two million Americans are infected each year by resistant germs, and 14,000 die as a result, the World Health Organization reports.

In an effort to produce cheap meat, factory farming has been cramming more and more animals into smaller spaces, and feeding them antibiotics to prevent infections. When antibiotics are given to a living creature, our systems can only use about 5 percent. The rest (95 percent) is excreted into the environment. Snippets of antibiotic DNA wind up in soil microbes and other bacteria because these tiny creatures “swap” genes, constantly exchanging genetic information and evolving.

One study found antibiotic-laced DNA in all water sources tested; from effluent ponds on factory dairy farms, wastewater recycling plants, to drinking-water treatment plants, and even wild river sediments. Amy Pruden, one of the study’s researchers, found that the DNA that helps make germs resistant to antibiotics was hundreds to thousands of times higher in water affected by people or factory farms, but still prevalent in smaller quantities in pristine water sources.

A 2001 study by University of Illinois microbiologist Roderick Mackie documented antibiotic-resistant genes in groundwater downstream from pig farms, and also in local soil organisms which normally do not contain them. His research found that tainted DNA was in the bodies, underfoot in the soil, and in the water around conventional feedlots. Mackie noted that soil bacteria around antibiotic-using farms carried 100 to 1,000 times more resistance genes than the same soil bacteria around organic farms.

Wastewater lagoons attract wildlife like migratory geese and ducks that carry strains of the Avian Flu. When the wildlife add their microbes, we create an unnatural combination of resistant bacteria. Worse, feedlots often use the wastewater lagoons to irrigate crops. A University of Kansas environmental engineer noticed a dramatic spike in antibiotic resistant genes happening on one Kansas feedlot. He discovered that new calves were given “shock doses” of antibiotics which they promptly excreted into the lagoons. That effluent was pumped to the fields to fertilize the cattle feed.

They were spraying the crops with highly resistant bacteria from the lagoon, and then feeding it back to the cattle, which we later eat.

Conservation medicine has been warning us for years about the potential for an outbreak. Doctors estimate that 75 percent of human illness originates with animals, such as Avian Flu, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, Legionnaire’s and so on. Preventing and treating outbreaks through conservation medicine involves treating the root environmental problems, such as loss of deer habitat bringing deer (and ticks carrying Lyme) closer to humans.

Another study of the mouths of healthy kindergartners found that 97 percent had bacteria with antibiotic resistant DNA for four out of six tested antibiotics. Resistant microbes comprised 15 percent of the children’s oral bacteria, although none of the children had taken antibiotics in the past three months.

Mexico, and many other countries are vying for American markets by producing food exports in unsanitary and often immoral conditions. These conditions are often worse crucibles for disease-resistant microbes than American factory farms. If you really want to protect yourself and your family from superbugs like the swine flu, avian flu and other human-folly diseases:

Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning sustainability writer, artist, and founder of the Wallkill River School in the Mid-Hudson region of New York. Shawn can be reached at shawn@zestoforange.com.